Everyone can make a contribution to climate protection! Based on the motto “avoid, reduce and offset”, everyone can take responsibility for his or her own footprint. The most common everyday causes of harmful emissions are travel with cars or aeroplanes and infrastructural elements such as heating and energy consumption.

Here are some tips on how you can take simple everyday actions to help climate protection and reduce your environmental and carbon footprint:

Travel

Travelling with public transport creates fewer greenhouse gases than travelling by car. For instance, in Switzerland, it is 25 times better to travel by train than by car. In France, it is 12.4 times better; in Germany, 3 times better; in Belgium 5.2 times better. The differences are based on the various power generation methods used in the various countries.

Whenever possible, avoid flying. According to estimates, flights are responsible for 1-2% of all CO2 emissions.

Fully occupied cars create less CO2 emissions per person than a car with just one occupant.

Offset the flights and car trips that you can’t avoid with a high-quality climate protection project.

Household

There is significant potential for reducing emissions in using renewable energies, such as water power, wind power and solar power.

Use energy-saving light bulbs.

Turn out the lights when you leave the room.

Heating water uses a lot of energy. For this reason, taking short showers is more environmentally friendly than filling the bathtub.

Switching off the standby operation of TVs and PCs contributes to reducing energy consumption.

Refrigerators and other devices in the categories A+ or A++ are significantly more efficient than devices without an energy efficiency label.

It is not necessary to use an electrical device to humidify rooms. It is often enough to hang a wet towel on the heater or to put a container of water in the room.

Keeping the windows open makes for increased energy consumption for heating. It is more efficient to regularly give rooms a brief airing out. Lowering the room temperature by 1 °C can usually reduce energy consumption by 4%.

Setting the hot water heater to 60 °C contributes to reducing energy consumption.

Using lower temperatures for the washing machine reduces energy consumption.

Hanging up the washing to dry instead of using a dryer contributes to reducing CO2 emissions.

Putting a cover on pots when cooking saves energy.

Calculate and offset the CO2 emissions that your household generates through energy consumption and heating despite these reduction measures.

Source: mobitool.ch

Our climate education offers interactive and action-orientated educational programmes in order to encourage each and every person to make a contribution to our future.